INTELLIGENCE & PROBLEM SOLVING

Important people

  • Francis Galton: late 1800’s, the one who became interested in developing an intelligence test

  • Alfred Binet: hired by the French government in order to test children to identify what children may need more support in school; first to use mental age

  • Lewis Terman: working at stanford and took binet’s general idea and transitioned it for a more englush speaking audience, invented:

    • Stanford Binet: first English language intelligence test that had wide usage; still focused on children

    • IQ: transitioned mental age into IQ: mental age/chronological age x 100

  • David Wechsler: first to come up with an adult intelligence scale; developed deviation IQ: how different you are from other ppl your age

    • WAIS:

Types of testing

  • intelligence: the point is to look across a large number of domains and see how well you perform in them; have a SD of 15 points

  • aptitude: more specific than intelligence testing, measuring specific abilities

  • achievement: looking to see what they have mastered

  • testing perspective vs cognitive perspective

    • testing: concerned with the amount of intelligence you have

    • cognitive: concerned with how you use your intelligence; more applied approach - what are you doing when you are actually using your intelligence

  • cultural bias: there are going to be certain people who perform better because they have cultural experience with people who wrote the test

Theories of intelligence

  • crystallized vs fluid:

    • crystalized: focused on your factual information

    • fluid: logic, reason, decision making

  • g-factor: ferman created, general intelligence; comprised by these 3 categories that are distinct but highly correlated:

    • verbal: language or verbal provessing

    • spatial: related to spatial information; how to manipulate items

    • quantitative: mathematical information

  • Cattel-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Model: said intelligence was comprise by 3 elements; a general category (basically g-factor that they called general) a broad category of any cognitive ability and narrow that focus on distinct abilities (such as perceptual abilities)

    • general

    • broad

    • narrow : may or may not be cognitive based

  • Sternberg’s Triarchic theory: lots of other ways people can be intelligent

    • analytic: being able to analyze something and take different types of information to process and evaluate

    • creative: being able to come up with new and unusual ways to solve different types of problems

    • practical: how you solve problems that you encounter on your day to day lives

  • Gardner’s 8 Intelligences:

    • kinesthetic knowledge: move and work your body

      • thurstone: 7-8 knowledges is too few, he went very broad and general to idea of intelligence, 180+ categories

      • guilford:

Elements of intelligence:

  • heritability: how well genetics can explain any kind of intelligence; originally thought intelligence was genetic —talking about heritability as a group, looking at genetics and how traits are passed down at a group level not individual (looking at it as a population)

  • cumulative deprivation hypothesis: living in a deprived environment tends to have a negative impact on intelligence

  • reaction range says your genetics determine your potential range of your intelligence; says your genes determines cutoffs and environment exact score

  • Flynn effect: intelligence scores are increasing across generations, for every decade we see a 3-point increase in the average IQ

intellectual extremes

  • giftedness:

  • disability:

    • criteria: has to have a specific cruteria

      • onset: looking for intellectual disability prior to adulthood/injury

      • adaptive functioning: have to an inadequate ability to function in their day to day lives; have more difficulty in engaging in typical day to day problems than the average person

      • iq: have to fall into the bottom portion of the scale, IQ of 70 or below

intellectual disability

  • 4 categories

    • mild: 85% fall into this category:

    • moderate

    • severe

    • profounc

  • origins

    • organic: intellectual disability is due to some genetic component or some sort of brain damage (down syndrome - genetic)

    • prenatal: some issue in the gestation of a fetus that causes a change in development of the brain or nervous system (fetal alcohol syndrome)

    • environmental: situational characteristics after birth that contribute to the disability; poor nutrition, exposure to dangerous chemicals, if an environmental it is more common for it to fall into the mild category

    • unknown: we don’t know what led/associated with

Categories of Problems

  • convergent: problems that have a known solution and require learned and analytic strategies

  • divergent: don’t have a known solution requiring novel strategies

  • well-defined: problem that has a clear start state and goal state, know where problem starts and know where to go, know the steps to how to get there

  • ill-defined: some sort of lack of clarity, don’t know where starting or where to go, or how to get there

Types of Problems

  • inducing structure: where you are trying to put some sort of structure or relationship onto the problem in order to get to the solution

  • arrangement: need to take the elements of the problem and rearrange them in order to get to the solution

  • transformation: change some aspect of the problem in order to get to the solution

Ways to Solve Problems

  • means-end analysis: process where you are searching for the steps to decrease the difference between current state and goal state

  • trial and error: trying stuff as it comes to your mind randomly, no strategy at all - requires almost no cognitive power

  • algorithm: writing out every possible solution until you get to the right one - going to take a lot of time, resources, and cognitive

  • heuristic: middle ground, taking a shortcut in the algorithm; not necessarily going to take u to the solution but it is likely to take u there

  • subgoals: taking a big problem and breaking it into smaller problems

  • changing the representation:

  • incubation/insight: decide to stop thinking about it for a little bit

Creativity

  • what is it?: it is a form of problem solving focused on finding a novel way to solve a problem that is still useful

  • divergent thinking: tend to be more creative, find many possible solutions to a problem

  • convergent thinking: trying to find the singular one best option to solve a problem

  • 4 stages:

    • preparation: finding and describing the problem that you are trying to solve

    • incubation: putting problem to the side and not focusing on it

    • insight: suddenly there is a solution that has come to mind; eureka moment!

    • elaboration-verification: now going to test that solution and see if it works

Correlates of creativity

  • expertise: a lot more able to be creative if you understand the surrounding you are trying to be creative in

  • imaginative thinking: ability to see things in a new and unusual way. positively correlated with creativity; ability to notice things that others don’t

  • venturesome personality: someone who has a personality that is seeking out new experiences, happy to deal with ambiguity and tend to have a lot of perseverance

  • independence: creative people tend to be more independent in their judgements and decisions; may listen to others but come to final decision on their own

  • intrinsic motivation: motivated to do things more internally than an external reward; need an internal drive to get to whatever position

  • creative environment: